Tag Archives: psychotherapy

Why should scientific skeptics care about refuting anti-psychiatry? Compared with other forms of pseudoscience, such as creationism or climate change denialism, anti-psychiatry has received considerably less skeptical attention. Yet anti-psychiatry is a dangerous pseudoscience that causes real harm. Like alternative medicine quacks, anti-psychiatry exploits vulnerable people and by denying the existence of psychiatric conditions or dismissing them as harmless, proponents of anti-psychiatry deny the suffering of human beings.

After debunking the claims made by the anti-psychiatry proponent Tin, this person continued to make a long list of assertions about psychiatry. When your opponent blasts you with multiple, long texts, it is very difficult to ensure that you responded to every single assertion (I am sure I accidentally missed some in this post, and I’m sure I will be hearing about it too). To a certain extent, that is the goal of this kind of shotgun approach (sometimes called the Gish Gallop in honor of the young earth creationist Duane Gish who frequently used this technique): make as many flawed and unsupported assertions as possible in an attempt to overwhelm the opposition. If any claim is forgotten or not decisively refuted due to time or space, declare victory. This is also related to what is known as the asymmetry of pseudoscience: it takes a few seconds to make a pseudoscientific claim, but anywhere from ten minutes to several hours to research and refute one of the claims in detail. In that sense, scientific skepticism is always an uphill battle. However, once the refutation is out there online, anyone who comes across a similar claim can find it with a search engine and review the material in the references. So although I have little hope that the arguments and evidence I present will convince a ingrained anti-psychiatry proponent, it is still worth doing. Read more of this post

A while back, I cam across an interesting study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Bridge et. al. (2005) looked at the number of new cases of emergent suicidality during a clinical psychotherapy trial for depression in adolescents and what important predictors were at play. Emergent suicidality can be defined as an increase in the rate of suicide, suicidal attempts, preparation for suicide and suicidal thoughts during the early stages of treatment, although definitions sometimes varies across studies (Meyer et. al. 2010).

The general message of the Bridge et. al. study was that the rate of emergent suicidality in the drug-free psychotherapy trial was 12.5% (this was not attributable to the therapy itself). They also found that the strongest predictor of emergent suicidality was the level of self-reported suicidal thoughts at the baseline rather than what was recorded during the intake interview. So the more suicidal thoughts you have at the start of psychotherapy, the more likely you are to experience suicidality during the psychotherapy treatment.

In this clinical trial, which enrolled subjects similar to those enrolled in pharmacotherapy clinical trials, rates of emergent suicidality in patients receiving psychotherapy but no pharmacotherapy were comparable to rates observed in antidepressant trials. Self-reported suicidality in the week before intake predicted the onset of emergent suicidality to a much greater extent than did interview-rated suicidality, indicating that self-report may be a necessary component to the assessment of adolescent suicidal risk.

This is an important finding, because it casts a shadow of doubt over studies purporting to show an increase level of suicidality during treatment with antidepressants. Read more of this post

A few months ago, Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and an staunch supporter of evolution against creationists, made a series of remarkably flawed claims about medical psychiatry in general and antidepressants in particular. He did this after reading a couple of book reviews on a few controversial books on psychiatry and asserted that medical psychiatry was a scam. Needless to say, I confronted his claims in Why Jerry Coyne is Wrong about Medical Psychiatry and shown that Prof. Coyne made several glaring errors: he incorrectly characterized the mainstream view on the causes of depression, he claimed that the effectiveness of a drug was not evidence for the underlying model (thus implicitly agreeing with HIV/AIDS denialists that the effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment is not evidence that HIV causes AIDS), he did not understand the difference between genetic mapping and estimations of heritability, he advocated Big Pharma conspiracy theories, incorrectly claimed (based on Kirsch flawed studies) that antidepressants are no better than placebo and contradicted himself by claiming that mental disorders were not caused by chemical factors in the brain while at the same time claiming that antidepressants cause psychopathology without any evidence.

After this, I stopped regularly visiting his blog, so it is only now that I noticed that he wrote a follow-up article called Peter Kramer defends antidepressants. In it, Prof. Coyne repeats many of the same flawed arguments as before and it reads like an advertisement of Kirsch book on antidepressants. It is now clearer than ever that Prof. Coyne has gone of the deep end with regards to this topic. It is clear that his pseudoskepticism is deepening and that is why I have decided to write another criticism. There will necessarily be some repeats of content that I discussed in previous entries, but will try to keep it to a minimum.

Like this:

Debunking Denialism

Modern life presents us with an apparent paradox: science has a strong cultural authority, yet primitive darkness is coming back in the shape of creationism, quack medicine, opposition to vaccination, HIV/AIDS denialism, anti-psychiatry and so on.

Debunking Denialism takes on the enemies of reason.

Article Library

If you want to read more content from Debunking Denialism, check out the article library, or the main content below.

"I realize that 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM) or, what quackademics like to call it now, 'integrative medicine' (IM) is meant to refer to 'integrating' alternative therapies into SBM or 'complementing' SBM with a touch of the ol’ woo, but I could never manage to understand how 'integrating' quackery with SBM would do anything but weaken the scientific foundation of medicine."

- David Gorski, cancer surgeon and debunker of pseudoscience (source).

"Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."

"If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet"

"As an aside, it is ironic that CAM proponents often simultaneously tout how individualized their treatment approach is, but then claim that one product or treatment can cure all cancer. Meanwhile they criticize the alleged cookie-cutter approach of mainstream medicine, which is actually producing a more and more individualized (and evidence-based) approach to such things as cancer."

- Steven Novella, neurologist and founder of the New England Skeptical Society. (source).

"Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufﬁcient to detect even rare associations. These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads."

"To me, skepticism is not believing what someone tells you, investigating all the information before coming to a conclusion. Skepticism is a good thing. Global warming skepticism is not that. It’s the complete opposite of that. It’s coming to a preconceived conclusion and cherry-picking the information that backs up your opinion. Global warming skepticism isn’t skepticism at all."

- John Cook, Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland (source).

“Rather than persisting in the view that they have been ‘rejected by science’, advocates in the cryptozoology community have more work to do in order to produce convincing evidence for anomalous primates and now have the means to do so. The techniques described here put an end to decades of ambiguity about species identification of anomalous primate samples and set a rigorous standard against which to judge any future claims."

“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”